Propaganda and the tragedy of consent

Why did the people of Europe support the First World War for so long? They
believed propaganda – the newspapers, posters, advertisements, church
sermons and socialist speeches – that called for a fight for national
identity

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Munich reacts: Adolf Hitler joins those celebrating Germany’s declaration of war on Russia on August 2, 1914Photo: Time Life Pictures

The demonstration that took place at Munich’s Odeonsplatz on August 2, 1914 – to celebrate Germany’s declaration of war with Imperial Russia – has achieved iconic status in the memory of the First World War. Thanks in no small part to the photograph showing a youthful Adolf Hitler in the boisterous crowd, it has come to encapsulate the enthusiasm with which European populations were deemed to have welcomed the outbreak of the Great War.

Hitler later confessed that, “overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, [he] fell down on [his] knees and thanked Heaven […] for granting him the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time”.

Clearly impressed and shocked by such a display of nationalist fervour, the philosopher Bertrand Russell “discovered to [his] horror that average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war”.

Russell may have mistaken the attitude of a few demonstrators – often young and middle-class men – for the sentiment of the many, who dreaded the repercussions of war as much as they feared the consequences of defeat. But nonetheless, there was widespread support for the war across the nations. Many European cities saw similar demonstrations of noisy nationalism that defined, in the eyes of many commentators, the first weeks of mobilisation.

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The real tragedy of the First World War is perhaps not that it was so costly in lives and treasure, but that the populations of Europe consented to war for so long and so allowed the carnage to continue.

This is what we may call the tragedy of consent. Playing it down has long hampered our comprehension of the “seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century and prevented many nations from coming to terms with the role they played in their own victimisation.

As Britain and her allies remain engaged in military operations across the world, in an age of professional soldiering, one cannot ignore the fact that the fate of those fighting and dying on our behalf remains, as it was during the Great War, our individual and collective responsibility.

From the mid-Twenties, as warring nations came to terms with the devastating human and material legacies of the conflict, these images of enthusiastic patriotism seemed to encapsulate the tragedy of European and imperial populations. By this reading, they were populations hoodwinked into the conflict by patriotic lies, maintained in a state of mental subjugation by propaganda and censorship, and led into battle by incompetent and callous generals.

Let’s not confuse consent with nationalist enthusiasm. Despite sporadic outbursts such as those in Munich, the warring nations never fell for the nationalist frenzy that is too often associated with August 1914. But their common consent to the war accounts for the duration of a conflict of unprecedented scale.

So why were nations so quick to consent? Because the war that broke out in 1914 was not simply the result of geopolitical and strategic tensions. In the words of the French historian Élie Halévy, it was about something far more fundamental: a “quarrel between nation and nation, culture and culture” – a cause that resonated far more deeply with people.

This battle between empires and nations pitted competing visions of the European and international orders that put cultures and ideologies at the heart of the business of war. This wasn’t about military strategy for the various populations; it was about their lives and futures. Most British commentators claimed Britain stood for liberal democracy and international law against authoritarian Germany. The alternative to war – German occupation and domination – was seen as unacceptable across the political spectrum. For the French union leader Léon Jouhaux, his countrymen were “soldiers of freedom” who would rid the world of German imperialism and autocracy.

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Most German intellectuals asserted their country’s duty to defend its political model and ambitions, even at the expense of other nations’ interests. “Have faith in us! Believe, that we shall carry on this war to the end as a civilised nation, to whom the legacy of a Goethe, a Beethoven and a Kant is just as sacred as its own hearths and homes,” proclaimed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, the 1914 document endorsed by 93 prominent German scientists, scholars and artists, declaring their support for military action.

In the few days in which the diplomatic crisis reached its climax and mobilisation orders were published, many felt, like Winston Churchill, that this was “no ordinary war, but a struggle between nations for life and death”. So a war of national defence became for many a personal battle to protect one’s home – and soldiers, who were but civilians in uniform, were part of the consent. Few soldiers died for abstract ideals of nation; most risked lives to defend the safety of their friends, family and home.

Through newspapers, posters, advertisements, church sermons and socialist speeches, this language of mobilisation soon swept through nations at war. As the Socialist Pioneer of Northampton put it in 1916, there could “be no peace while the frightful menace of world domination by force of German armed might looms about and above us”.

Such was the strength of consent that it became difficult in Britain to show opposition to the war. Legislation such as the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914 curtailed civil liberties, while churches, voluntary organisations and individuals sought to stamp out opposition by suppressing and condemning dissenters. Keir Hardie, the Scottish socialist and labour leader who was also a staunch pacifist, routinely saw his speeches in 1914 disrupted by hecklers.

Across nations and social classes, people were convinced of the necessity of war, which they justified, as the cultural historian John Horne put it, out of a sense of war as “legitimate self-defence”. On August 1, 1914, Georges Crassous, a French soldier and socialist activist, wrote to his parents of departing for the front “satisfied to be defending their persons and their property”.

It is ironic that in asserting their opposition to other nations – and confirming their consent to war – European populations demonstrated how much they had in common. Even in Russia, where revolution had shaken the foundations of the Tsarist regime as recently as 1905, the rural masses rallied to defend the nation; 96 per cent of soldiers reported for duty.

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The French and German armies encountered similarly few difficulties in recruiting. With 1.5 per cent of all conscripts unaccounted for, Germany encountered half as many draft-dodgers as it had expected. The memoirs of German soldiers in the battle of the Somme showed they were convinced that the fate of their heimat – homeland – and the safety of their families rested on their capacity to defeat France and to break the encirclement allegedly sought by her Russian ally. As private Otto Riebicke put it in 1917, “Germany’s guard protects the girlfriend, the wife and the fatherland”. The country’s best known patriotic song, The Watch on the Rhine, was rewritten as ‘‘The Watch on the Somme’’. One did not have to embrace the war to be committed to its victorious end. But as war dragged on for far longer than anyone had expected and took its heavy toll, commitment to the war effort began to shift in 1915 as nations began to question the mounting human and material cost.

Nations’ consent rested on the assumption that the state would protect and provide for the families of those who fought for the country. Strikes and protest did not express opposition to the war but reminded employers and the state of their obligations.

Critics of military recruitment, taxation, supply and shortages of food or coal could not be altogether silenced and such issues threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the state, tearing apart each population’s belief in what their country stood for.

As shortages and inflation undermined living standards, strikes and demonstrations broke out over “profiteering” and “shirking” as well as working conditions. Those who went on strike, such as workers on the Clyde in 1915, Berlin women in 1917 and Parisian metalworkers in 1918, claimed their sacrifice justified their protest. Each social group defended their collective interest and their patriotic record, standing by their consent while exposing the cracks.

But for women forced to queue for food in Berlin, the state was not living up to the standards set by their men at the front. And state authorities neglected the working classes at their peril. As German General Wilhelm Groener put it in November 1916, “the war could in any case not be won against the opposition of the workers”. Populations started to equate the unprecedented level of casualties and mounting economic difficulties with the sacrifice borne of wartime mobilisation. By 1918, patriotism and citizenship had become all about sacrifice and no longer about preserving a cultural and national identity.

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Conservative publications such as the Northampton Independent had long ceased to indulge in the myth of war enthusiasm. “What a lot of maudlin nonsense is written and preached about war as a purifier, a toughener of moral fibre, a stimulus to wholesome discipline, etc… All this is a travesty of the tragedy of the whole ghastly business. … Our boys […] nurse no false heroics about it, I can tell you. Our boys frankly acknowledge what the alternative to defeat means in this war and tell you they prefer to die with honour than survive with shame.”

Consent had given way to a reshaping of global nations, unleashing new political forces that saw mass movements for change – and real change across many nations and societies.

The First World War demonstrated the transformative potential of total war. As Halévy put it: “The world crisis of 1914-1918 was not only a war – the war of 1914, but also a revolution – the revolution of 1917”. Beyond Russia, the war had brought down the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and allowed the birth or rebirth of nations across Europe. From Washington to Beijing through Toronto and Berlin, social movements, often led by veterans and former war workers, challenged established political, racial, gendered and social hierarchies.

In the eyes of these protesters, progressive and redistributive social policies were expected to repay the sacrifices they had consented to during the war. French women protested unsuccessfully for the extension of suffrage. In the US, African-American veterans remained subjected to Jim Crow laws. Social and racial inequalities persisted despite the promises made in wartime.

For the Allied nations, the price of victory was, as the British historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, “bankruptcy and physical exhaustion”. The war did not only blur the boundaries between soldiers and civilians. It showed warring populations were not merely victims of the conflicts; they were – through their consent - also agents of destruction.

*Pierre Purseigle is a research fellow at Yale University, associate professor in modern European history at the University of Warwick and president of the International Society for First World War Studies